ALL AS LONG DISTANCE NEIGHBOURS

HANAE WILKE – VIVIEN ZHANG – PETER MOHALL

+ graphics & sound by NORMAN ORRO / MUSIC FOR YOUR PLANTS

In statistics, the notion of Dispersion denotes the extent to which a distribution is stretched.

Standard Deviation is the most commonly used measure of dispersion and it plays a key role also in the explanation of some physical phenomena, such as – in accordance with the Fluctuation theory – the reason why the sky is blue.

Dispersion is also a distance measure basically by contrast with location or central tendency and when it manifests itself through a perspective of non-coincidence, it figuratively takes on the meaning of proximal presence. Along these lines, it can be also translated into our collective life experience in a way that legitimises its truth as strategy of being in the world.

This dispersion tendency belongs to our modernity as a way that captures the paradoxes of our time and the risk of a collective alienation. The rich potential provided by the digital tools, that make communication accessible to the multitude without the use of the body, generates new forms of closeness in which inner and outer, self and other, are constantly subverted. Therefore, much of the power and meaning of this kind of togetherness owes its existence to something that is de facto absent.

Recalling Bahuman, it is safe to say that the easiness of the connections has changed the experience of social space to such an extent that it is no longer defined by a territorial proximity, but rather, on the contrary, by the innate and human inclination to secure our own borders. The alteration of the social space notion also drags the mutation of the experience of time. It follows an immersion into the present that leaves behind the experience of the duration itself.

Far from that kind of active presence to the mankind affairs assumed by McLuhan, it is possible to recognise that the participation in a narrow sense has been replaced by its digital simulacrum, generating a kind of social cohesion that finds its very substance into its own reproduction.

The exasperation of such dynamics has fabricated a new age of narcissism which, making a self-centred human being so socially acceptable, easily ends up falling into a form of social competition: we perceive ourselves as dissociated from “the other” and Self-determination appears the only value and the exclusive criterion of every other determination.